Posts Tagged ‘people’

Six Degrees or Less

June 23rd, 2010, posted in Random Musings, That's Life

From Wikipedia:

Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.

Long ago I stopped assuming that I wouldn’t know so-and-so from such-and-such.

Once, when I was a kid, we went to Hawaii. Sitting in the hot tub we got talking to a fellow in the pool. The usual conversation about where are you from…turned out he was best friends with one of my second cousins in a little town outside of Prince George.

Another time I was working in a hair salon and a kid several years younger than me came in. He asked where I was from, when I told him he said I might know his friend. I replied that PG had more than 50,000 people living there so the odds were slim. He gave me a name. I sheepishly replied that he had lived right behind me and I’d had a many-years long crush on his older brother. Man, does that make it look like a hick town!

I spent a month on a teensy little island off Oahu during Grad school. On our last day a girl, who had just arrived, and sat down with the three of us and said “I heard there were other Canadian here”. Turned out that she had lived down the street from one of my labmates and they knew a lot of the same people…in Toronto.

But yesterday was pretty amazing. I was at a BBQ for our volunteer group and one of the former students in the class started chatting with me. His wife had previously told me that he was from Salmon Arm, but we never got any farther than that. Last night he said to me “I think a relative of yours taught me in Grade 1″. Yup, my Granny was his grade 1 teacher, in Canoe. The man grew up in Canoe, a teensy little place outside of Salmon Arm that most people have never heard of. He also knew my Uncle and went to the church that my Granny played the organ for.

Small world indeed!

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Group Dynamics

October 6th, 2008, posted in Random Musings

Standing Out From the CrowdSometimes individuals don’t fit the mold. It’s not their fault…maybe they are just different. Maybe they see the world differently, maybe they have a different philosophy on life, maybe their idea of beauty isn’t what everyone else’s is. Life would be pretty dull if we all shared exactly the same ideals and opinions.

The saying “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder” first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. It didn’t appear in its current form in print until the 19th century, but in the meantime there were various written forms that expressed much the same thought. In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his Euphues and his England, wrote:

“…as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.”

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love’s Labours Lost, 1588:

“Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues”

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1741, wrote:

“Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion”

David Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include:

“Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”

The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of ‘The Duchess’. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there’s the line “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, which is the earliest citation of it that I can find in print.

From: The Phrase Finder

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